Starting to care: making place with microbes

Abstract

Despite the many conversations in the environmental humanities about care and making kin with the more-than-human, there has been little focus on the sourdough starter and its relation with human cultivators. This essay works alongside the sourdough starter to encourage the growth of these conversations – their rise – by using a material geography framework and emphasizing the practices of care through which microbes and humans can explore new ways of knowing. This approach allows for explorations of new notions of place-making and generates questions of ethical working alongside when the thing-place being cultivated is consumed by the cultivator.